Silence
by detective-sweetheart
Summary: ...there was a pause, and then, a different voice, the same one that had spoken, but at the same time, it had changed.


_A/N: This is what happens when I get bored. Couldn't help myself after that stupid reporter pulled that little stunt of his...never mind. L&O isn't mine. _

When the envelope came, it was all he could do to keep from reaching into the desk drawer underneath it for the bottle he knew he was there. It was odd, he mused, things like this normally wouldn't have sent him in that direction, but this…This was different. It wasn't the first time his personal life had been pried into for someone else's purposes, and it wasn't the first time it had hurt. But this time…it bothered him more than before.

He sat there in his office, alone, long after the workday had ended, turning on a lamp when shadows from outside came in through the windows, fueled by the streetlights and the wind. The dim light it provided did no good. The envelope was still there, with his name on it and those bright red stamps that said "Photos", warning whoever handled it not to bend it. That photographer…the name escaped him at the moment, but he knew that later on it would return, when he was least thinking about it.

It scared him to think of what he would see if he looked. Nine years was a long time…a painfully long time, he thought, and once more found himself fighting to keep from going to the bottle. How that reporter had known…Nine years. No matter how much he tried to push that thought away, it always went back to years. Nine years of not knowing. Nine years of silence. Footsteps told him that the people who cleaned the District Attorney's Office every night had arrived, but he remained where he was.

He wondered if it would ever be used against him again, in cases like this one, and didn't doubt it. Where no one had known about it before, the whole damn city knew now. And there was one bit of his personal life, out in the open, the one thing about himself that he hadn't wanted anyone to know. It was ironic, he mused, almost bitterly, as he continued to sit, he could sit there and prosecute parents day in and day out for ignoring their children, but had never once bothered to prosecute himself. Not in a courtroom, he thought, but in his own heart and mind.

The difference, the other side of him tried to argue as silence continued to linger, was that his child was alive, and hopefully well. The photographs would tell him, and he knew it, but he could not bring himself to look. He wondered if it was because they had earlier been offered as a bribe. Sure, he hadn't taken it, but they had come, anyway, without his asking for them. He wondered if it was a peace offering, and the thought upset him, so he pushed it away, instead glancing towards one of the few photographs he had on his desk.

And there was his daughter as he remembered her. She was smiling, which was always a good sign; used to be that he couldn't get her in front of a camera for anything, he thought, allowing a faint smile to cross his face as well as he continued to look. He wondered if the photographs in his desk would reflect what he saw in this one, only on an older face, one that had changed with time, the same way his had, though, he thought amusedly, probably looked decidedly better.

The silence was starting to grate on him. Finally moving, he reached out to open one of his desk drawers; not the one containing the photographs, but another. He drew out a book that held no significance, other than the fact that one of its pages bore a number that did. He flipped quietly through the pages until he found it, and stared down at it, half of him screaming for him to just forget it, to let it go, and the other half telling him not to let go, to fix it, the way he should have fixed it long before that damn article. After a while, the latter side won out. Picking up the phone before him, he dialed the number he saw, and waited.

The phone rang three times before he heard someone picking up. There was laughter, and then, "Hello?"

He hesitated only a split second before speaking. "Bailey?"

Silence. And then, a different voice, the same that had spoken seconds before, but somehow, it had changed. "Dad?"


End file.
